DKos asked us to write a blog on a movie or song that changed our lives. Well, the words in the title of this piece changed my life.
Early in 2015 these words kept coming into my mind. (No, it was not a voice in my head.) In retrospect I realize that what they meant was that the world was too much with me. After a month or two of them coming to me time and again, I started cutting out the “static” that most of us endure as part of our daily lives. I quit watching TV, and as much as I like my local NPR station, I stopped listening to it and all other radio. I also stopped my subscription to the local newspaper. I still keep up on the major stories online, and my only exception to boycotting TV is that I still watch football mostly Notre Dame and some NFL.
I realized that I had been experiencing compassion and tragedy overload. It’s not that I don’t care about what is happening in the world. I do care very deeply , but I guess I could no longer endure the daily stream of murder, violence and mayhem that is portrayed not just on the news programming, but especially on many of the TV series and movies. Words cannot express how liberating it is to be free of the daily infusions of fear and violence and commercials that are the standard diet from the media.
It appears to me that whether by accident or design, constant infusions from all of our media are making all of us much more fearful, and at the same time much more desensitized, than we would be otherwise. Is it merely a coincidence that people who are more fearful are much more easily “herded like sheep” and more accepting of the loss of their civil liberties because of some nebulous fear that “they are coming over here to get us”? It, also, appears to me that exposure to the current media has desensitized many, if not all, of us to a high level of violence so that we are more accepting of it. It doesn’t “hit” us “hard” the way it might have a generation or two ago. It seems to me that we are slowly losing our sense of humanity.
After several months of reducing my “static” quotient I looked up those words on the Internet. I discovered that they are the title of a poem by William Wordsworth, and it was composed circa 1802. I have always liked poetry, and after reading it I realized I had read it or heard it read many years ago. After reading it many times over the last year or so I realized how much of an indictment of the modern world it represents even though it is well over 200 years old. It also touches on our “divorce” from nature, giving our hearts away to the material world and the inadequacy of our religions such that many of us are “forlorn” and wish for an earlier time when the gods seemed more “real.”
Please take the time to read it carefully many times, and let its message sink in through your thick layer of civilized enculturation. The words speak for themselves so I will not attempt to parse them any further.
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
William Wordsworth
Composed Circa 1802
(7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850)